Does the ‘Perfect Sound’ Exist?

Welcome back to the Board. It goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bond. And I’m the Culture Editor at the Bulwark. I’m very pleased to be rejoined today by Jeff Edgers.

Jeff is an American journalist and writer who is a national arts reporter for the Washington Post. He is the author of Walk This Way, Run D m C. Arrow Smith, and the song that changed American music forever. He also hosted Edge of Fame, which is a podcast profiling figure such as Norm McDonald, Ava Du Rene, Roseanne Bar and Chevy Chase. Jeff, thank you for being back on the show, really.

Appreciate it. Glad to be here. So today, we’re talking about a subject that I find fascinating and know very little about. And specifically, that is audio quality. The idea that you wrote about recently of finding the perfect sound.

And within that idea and within this story, there are lots of interesting little threads to pull apart, like ideas of authenticity of technological progress and regression of quality versus accessibility. But the foundational idea in your story or at least kind of the way it begins almost with a prologue of sorts. As as a question of honesty, what did audio file Mike Espacito reveal that one of the big players in the new Vinyl boom, a company called Mobile Fidelity or MOPHY for short, was misleading customers about Well, and to normal people, like regular humans, this will seem almost

bizarre and insane. But so mobile fidelity, they put out these records that are reissues of older records, and they tend to be they call them audio file pressings. So for special people who love sound in a special way. So they’ll put out like Carol King’s Tapestry, but they’ll do it as a what none of this language should make any sense to you, Sunny. So just disregard it.

But it’ll be a one step record, which in I could explain for hours what that means. But and it’ll be at forty five RPM, not thirty three because you can fit all this more music inside the grooves. And it’ll be put out as a a box set where the record has become two records and it’s a hundred and twenty five dollars and it’ll sell out almost immediately. Well, depending on which record it is, sometimes they end up on eBay for hundreds more, etcetera, etcetera. So the big thing is that mobile fidelity, which are based in California, they, for years, have been talking about being analog only.

So, like, all tape. Everything is from tape. You get the tape from the studio. You transfer it onto, you know, this record somehow there are few steps in between. You make a blacker.

You make a mother, a father, press them. Whatever. But the idea was that the security of the analog process, which is a big deal to a lot of people, was preserved. What this fellow, Mike Espacito, heard and then broadcast on his YouTube channel and the rumor was then found to be true was that they were using a digital step in between. So they were capturing the audio with a digital step and then putting it on record.

And you know what? Like, Is that a good idea? Is that a bad idea? I’ll leave that to your ears. But the thing that was bizarre about it is that they basically didn’t tell anyone that since they started doing it in two thousand and eleven.

So when people heard about that, they felt instantly betrayed. These records did not change in sound at all. But suddenly the meaning of them change to many people. I wanna

I wanna hit on that just a little bit because there is a real question here about what what what is it actually that people are looking for with these recordings and these these records. Right? Are they looking for pure audio fidelity? Are they looking for some sort of imagined auditory greatness? Or is it is it almost a statement of aesthetic appeal as much as anything else.

Is it is it a statement of belonging to say, like, here’s a this is you know, analog only where no no digital nonsense in here. You know, what are what are people actually looking for with these albums? Well, everything. That’s where they’re look they’re looking for

all of that. And and some of them are looking for one thing and others are looking for another. Take this company I mean, let’s just think about how record is made. When the recording is made in the studio, it is then a mastering engineer works you know, with all the knobs and the things you see in all the Hollywood movies about recording studios, moving stuff around, figuring out what the sound should be, and then it’s pressed onto a record. Okay.

Well, there’s a company in England called the Electric Recording Company, which I examined but didn’t visit. The New York Times heard a story about them a few years ago. It’s kinda breathless like, whoa, it’s the greatest thing ever. And it’s this guy, very nice guy, Pete Hutchison. He’s got a big long beard and he restored all this equipment from the fifties.

And what he does is he’ll get the license to put out these canonical Jazz records or blues records like Miles Davis or John Coltery or Bill Evans. And he’ll get the tapes sent to him because he takes pictures of them and shows them to you. These precious tapes are in the fifties. And he will transfer them onto this record. And they will only make three hundred copies, and each copy is three hundred and eighty dollars or something with you know, the exchange rate.

And they’re instantly going for a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars on eBay because they’re bought up immediately. Now, I listen to some of those records and I wanna love them because They’re beautiful. They’re like, they look beautiful. Like, the packaging is awesome. They just look special.

I feel like I’m in the rarified club when I haven’t but I would listen to them and sometimes I’d compare them to like fifteen dollar reissues that I got in the eighties and I’d go, boy, that that sounds better or like it sounds the same or it it sounds I just I couldn’t understand what was going on there. And I wrote to Pete Hutchison, and he said, look, he said I said, who are the mastering engineers in here? I said, it says, like, some guy named CJ Potter is on here. And he wrote, wrote, well, look, CJ Potter and this other guy are on there, but really, they’re not really mastering engineers. They’re really just transfer the tape because we do no equalization.

We don’t do anything to those tapes. And that was what was going on. That was the most pure authentic representation of that tape, and it didn’t sound that great to me. Now, just to flip it quickly, I talked to a guy named Joe Harley. He oversees all of blue notes reissues for this tone poet program or many of them.

He’s, you know, that’s what he does. And Joe Harley was sitting in his room and a cross room was this shelves of beautiful pristine original blue note records. You know, all the stuff that the jazz people go nutty for, Lee Morgan, Blue Train, you know, and all this stuff worth probably thousands of dollars because you know, they’re in great condition. And what Joe said is and I’m not telling you to agree with him, but I’m telling you what he said. He said, every record I put out on tone code is better.

Than these because in the day the equipment was not good enough to actually capture what was on the tape. So when you heard Lee Morgan’s trumpet, you thought you were hearing something amazing. And it wasn’t amazing if it’s still good. There’s no question, but it wasn’t what was on the tape. What we’re doing because we have better equipment as we’re capturing what was on the tape and giving you a better product.

Now, so there you go. Like totally different viewpoints by people putting out prized objects into this universe.

And this gets too. This gets to the the kind of first character we meet in in your story. It was Tom this guy named Tom Port, who his his whole deal is finding what he calls hot stampers. Right? They’re the best vinyl pressings of any given album.

But usually, these are vintage. Right? I mean, you you you you have this great little thin yet in your in your piece where you’re basically trying to stump him on a on a hot stamper. You’re saying like, hey, here’s three identical albums, but not really identical, which which is the one that you like the best. How did that work out for him and for you?

Well, Tom Porte, the people

that make new records now or reissue records on new pressings hate Tom Porte so much. There are people in my story right now. Believe it or not. And I I should just ignore them and let it be. But there are people in my story who will not speak to me because we had Tom Port in that story.

It’s that competitive and aggressive and nasty in this universe. And the thing about Tom Port, I love Tom Port. He because he is not it to him, it’s a little bit of a game. I mean, the big thing that he says is basically no new records are good. Okay?

Well, that’s not really true, but it’s a marketing thing and he believes it. But what I will tell you about Tom Portis, he’ll say every old record is like a snowflake. No two are the same. If one rolls off the press at ten o eight, it’s gonna be different than the one that rolls off the press at ten o nine. So, you know, temperature, how much you’ve switched the hot vinyl with the with the, you know, with the stampers, all that stuff.

Who’s doing it? You know, your sign, anything. We have no control over it. So what Tom does is he goes out and he gets, like, twenty copies of Carol King’s Tapestry or Dyer Streit’s first record. He’s very, like, mainstream American.

You you know, you’re not he’s not sitting there like going over, you know, like, you know, very obscure free jazz. He’s really dealing with mainstream things. But they’ll listen to like twenty of these or his staff will listen to twenty of these. In this room, in California, where there are no windows, and the wires are hanging down from the ceiling to create no electrical interference, and they will decide what the hotstampers are. And sometimes they don’t come out with a hotstamper.

Hotsteeper is basically the best sounding version of the record in his opinion. And then they put it up on their website. You can go to better records now and look at it. And, like, Lets up on two on their website right now is listed at nine hundred and ninety dollars. Pet sounds I think goes for six hundred and forty nine.

Now People, again, people. The people in the audio world that don’t like Townport will say, what a rip off? What a fraud? But I’ll tell you about Townport. When I called him originally a long time ago, more than a year ago, and I said, Tom, this sounds crazy.

He goes, what what what old record do you have that you like? Can they go, I don’t know. Credence Clearwater Revival. I mean, when someone asked me, like, what old record I like, I always liked to say Credence Clearwater Revival. But I did have one, and it was a clean one.

So he sent me the record And one side was a hotstamp or one was not. You could have that. I mean, you could in in his universe, he will write one as You know, so But I’ve gotta tell you. That record sounded better than any version of credence I’d never heard. And I bought, like, a a beach

boys

record off of them for I think it was, like, a hundred nineteen dollars. It sounds amazing. So I’ve not heard Tom proclaim a record to sound good and have it not sound good. And then finally, if you don’t like the record or you don’t believe in the service or you don’t feel like it was worth it, you just get your money back. He he offers money back guarantees.

I’m sure he might chatter with you or tell you why you’re wrong, but he does give you your money back. So ultimately, what he’s doing is providing a service. So if you’re a really rich person like you own the Indianapolis cults and you want an awesome copy of pet sounds and you’re not looking to go all over the universe to find it. You pay him six hundred and forty nine dollars and you get the you get the best sounding copy of pet sounds you could find.

I mean, I I I I listen to this and I I a, believe you because again, he he won your challenge. He was able to pick out the hotstampers from the the the albums that you had picked out. I have no doubt that he has a sound that he is looking for. But at the same time, just as a as a reader and as a listener and frankly as as a listener who is borderline tone deaf anyway, this is not my realm of expertise. I I can’t help but wonder, you know, isn’t this is it a little bit like a food critic who, you know, says like you’ve never had a rib eye unless you’ve had the forty five day dry aged rib eye from, you know, where wherever whatever nice steak house.

Or something similar something similar to that. I mean, is how much of this is a matter of taste versus how much of it is an objective like here is sound quality that we can measure and it is

better. Well, so there’s a subtlety here that really is very good with your analogy. And, like, wine is a good thing that can come into this. You know, it’s like, there’s a subtlety to what you’re to what we’re talking about. But I will also tell you that If I had you come over, Sunny, and you’re welcome anytime as you know in the barn.

If I had you come over, I could very quickly play two different records for you and you would understand why one is garbage and one is great. So, like, there’s a beach boys. I mentioned in the thing, but there’s, like, a greatest hits box set that came out. I love I gobble up anything by the beach boys. I’m so excited to have this.

It’s like all cool mixes of, like, seb you know, whatever. But if you put that record on if you put in my room on off that record and then you put it on compared to the reissue of that analog production stood, It’s just like I’m

stealing

this from someone, but it’s like the difference between like shooting a bullet and throwing a bullet. It’s like the record version that is on capital And I love capital, not credit, you know, they have the they have the building with all the, you know, with the sign on it and the circle and it’s still there. It just sounds terrible. It sounds really squashed. You can hear a hiss throughout it.

It just sounds bad. And when you listen to the other version, you go, oh my god. So I was just doing a David Byrne profile and I had talking, I had seventy seven that I bought. Maybe in two thousand fourteen or fifteen, it was a reissue. So just as a hunch, I went to my local record store, I knew they had, like, six copies that were clean of the original pricing.

I just bought one. It was like thirty five bucks. And again, I put it on and it was crystal clear that one record was better than the other. Where I have more trouble is when I’m dealing with, like, multiple reissues and particularly if I’m in a room with, like, these guys and they’re, like, What do you think is better? You know, we’re like, isn’t mine better?

I I find that harder. But it’s clear that there are versions of these records that are good and versions that are bad. We haven’t even I’m sure you’re gonna get into it, but we haven’t even talked about digital, which is, you know, the revelation for me in this story was I can hear now without a billion dollars of equipment, the difference between a high res version of a song and you know, sort of like low res Spotify version. You can hear it now, and I’ve never been able to do that before. I

wanna let’s let’s skip ahead to that since since you you bring it up. I I find the the conversation about m p three versus lossless sound versus, you know, whatever. And and Neil Young’s Quixotic, I think, efforts a few years back to trying push for this, you know, higher quality audio, really fascinating because it tries to have the best of all worlds. It you we’re trying to have the the portability of the m p three with the quality of the vinyl, but it doesn’t quite work out because people don’t care about having both. Right?

I mean, I I what can you so the question here is twofold. One is, could you explain to us a difference between m p three and, like, higher quality lossless digital recordings? And also, why it just has failed to take off as a as a format? Well,

So I can’t really explain it scientifically other than all these analogies that people give you that seem to make some sense to me. But I mean, basically the idea with m p three was that you were the goal, the primary goal was getting as much material onto these portable devices. And so to do that, the technologist said, you know what? We can strip away parts of these recordings, and we can, you know, provide them on on phones or whatever device iPads, you know, that little I mean, I love those iPads. I love the one that was like a packet gum.

I thought that was a cool one. I didn’t really like the one that was tiny square I was lost that one, the one that you could put on your on your shirt or something. But so that was the idea behind that. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really notice. I was like, oh, this sounds good.

It was only later when I heard what Hyra’s audio is. That I thought, ah, this is really clear. You know, it’s like it’s obvious to me there’s something going on in this song that I didn’t hear on the m p three. And, you know, it’s even reached the point like, today, on on your iPhone, it’s like, you need this DAC, this digital analog converter. They still won’t allow you to listen to high res audio on your iPhone.

You need this little connector basically between your headphones and your and your iPhone if you wanna listen to high res, which is a pain. You know? Like, I don’t understand. I understand why. Like, they don’t wanna build they don’t wanna chip that’s so big that it it it creates an impact on your phone and they determine that mathematically, it’s more important to be able to make the iPhone the way they make it than to put better quality sound on it.

But, you know, you were mentioning Neil Young. I mean, I have on my desk this Polo player that I bought a few years ago when he put it out as his portable player that was supposedly higher resolution. It had, like, memory chips in it. You it looks like it told your own bar kind of I could not hear the difference. I tried everything.

I’ve loaded up an m p three. I put on I bought a high res version of the same song. I put on my stereo. I used headphones. It didn’t work.

But I would say today, I simply bought the service cobas q o b u z no one pronounces it right because from France and it’s like they don’t use a u after the q. And I’ve and I and I also always have I’ve paid for Spotify since it’s, you know, since forever. And so when I go and I take my twelve year old and I’m like, dude, listen to this and I put on a a song it’s obvious. I mean, it’s obvious that you you can hear it and on my stereo which is bookshelf speakers. You can hear the difference.

And of course, like, he’s like, And my son likes music. He has a record player, but he’s like, dad, but Spotify has Dana Carvey podcast. You know, like, he’s not gonna ditch spotify for cobas, but I just get both. Mhmm. You know, because cobas is the same price.

It’s just they don’t have all the programming and stuff, you know. Yeah. Does that make any sense? Well,

it does. It does. But I I I wanna I wanna hop back to something you meant you have a you have an intermediating device between your phone and your headphones, which is interesting to me. Because so have I don’t have Spotify. I have Amazon music.

I listen to Amazon music because I do everything through Amazon. It’s, you know, praise Bezos. But the But, you know, the the the the songs on there, some of them are described as HD Atmos, whatever. And is it is it making any difference? Or do I need to do something else to actually hear the the quality versus a, you know, kind of standard m p three?

Well, are you listening on your phone or on your computer? I generally I usually am listening on my phone. Yeah.

I think if it’s an iPhone I mean, I think you need you know, the thing I have is like a dragonfly. You can look it up. It’s like a little teeny deck that is a deck is, by the way. I mean, I have one also on my stereo now, which I bought. I consider the deck to be it’s like the taped deck component of the olden days.

It’s it’s a component. It just is a box that sits on your stereo and goes between your digital files converting them back into analog, which, you know, to explain why that works or how that works would take forever. But you know, it converts them back into analog to go into your stereo if you you know, if that’s important to you. I believe, I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I believe that you would need, like, this little Dragonfly thing. And they’re not I mean, I think they’re like ninety nine, one ninety nine, two ninety nine, that range.

They’re not that expensive. It’s just then you gotta remember to bring it and have you know, get but I think you need that if you wanna get the most out of out of your thing. But look, all this stuff we’re talking about. It’s like, I don’t know what headphones you have. They might be awesome, you know.

And I might be listening on worse headphones. I don’t really use headphones. I use earbuds, which are the worst. You know, like, I mean, they’re the the ones I use are okay, but I use them when I’m running. So I’m sure that they’re not wired, so they’re probably worse than than than anything else.

But all this stuff is like, what is your weakest link? Like, is your record player the weakest link? Is your media the weakest link? Is your room the weakest link? It’s all part of the same mix and it’s all about trade offs.

And ultimately, the only way to really win this to get the best sound or as good as sounds as you can get is to be like a basically like a a lonely old man in a basement with, like, billions of dollars and, like, I don’t wanna be that person. I wanna have great sound, but I also wanna, like, have my family around, like, listening to the records and my wife saying, like, turn that television record down or whatever that is. You know, it’s like it’s too grading. You know, I want I want that part of the mix here. And and so that’s where I’m at.

You know? What has

your equipment equipment journey been like? What what have you could you walk us through some of the upgrades that you have made over the course of both just as a listener, but also, you know, reporting out and telling the story.

Well, I had a Panasonic receiver from the seventies, which was pretty good, still have it. It’s a good receiver. I think it’s called the seven thirty seven I like that receiver. But then, like, when I was trying to get into this, you start getting, like, what does this sound like? What is that?

So I thought, oh, I should get a Macintosh. Macintosh is like the audio file universe receiver. So and then I like old stuff. So I I I made it even worse so myself. So I bought a Macintosh nineteen hundred receiver which is from like the early seventies.

I bought it from a dude on the Internet. It came here. I couldn’t figure out it it wasn’t that power that high powered. So I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with my speakers. Right?

So then I ordered, like, while this was going on, my wife was teaching she was abroad in, like, Jordan. So so it’s good for her because it was a nightmare. So I got all these speakers delivered to my house from like Amazon because I knew I could, like, turn them without any punishment. I misread something on the Internet and I bought powered speakers, you know, like powered speakers that you put on your on your computer. Monitor.

And what I didn’t understand is that when I put those connected this to the Mac, it blew it up somehow. Like, it it just something popped and it was dead. So it’s like, okay. I’ve already spent like nine hundred bucks in this thing. What do I do?

And then there’s a company that, you know, there are you can’t just bring this down to, like, the, you know, the best buy or something. So I had to, like, figure out how to get it to these guys audio classics I found in Western New York, but you have to send it to them and the thing weighs a hundred ninety pounds. So it’s like, sending it was,

like,

a hundred and twenty dollars and, like, has to be built to own buck. Already, you can see this in nightmare. And the other thing that happened is when I started wiring my speakers, I was standing on a chair, and I thought I could get behind there. I guess is why people get electricians. And I fell off the chair.

And as I fell off the chair, I broke one of the doors on our bookcase that was right there. So I, like, called my wife. It was like, I I she’s got this stereo, just blew up, broke the and she’s on the to her credit, she was like, look, it’s just money. Don’t worry about it. Just figure out where you need to so so I sent the Macintosh off.

Got it sent back to me. Hook that up. I had a I traded. There was a man, very nice man, but he was had problems with his back, and he was very overweight. And I found him on the Internet, and he had an old turntable, an acoustic research, XA, which is from the early sixties, which look cool.

And I traded in my turntable, which is a regular new turntable, but it was automatic. Like, at the end of the record, you didn’t have to stand up into so I got that. I put that on there. I put the I bought these Harvest bookshelf speakers. They were, like, three thousand dollars.

They’re from England. All the audio files said they were amazing. Got those. Put that on there. And I had a system that was working out well.

Then I started meeting all these people, and they were all, like, mocking my system so badly. But also, like, I was talking with like, I had a friend in New York who’s an architect and it’s really, really into stereo equipment. And he was like, he had this amazing turntable, this technique’s s p ten. It’s like prized turntable, and he and he but he wanted a better one and he was gonna build the plinth, which is the platform that sits in it. And he was gonna build in Virginia, and he had, like, he showed me there was, like, a it was so heavy.

It had to be lifted on, like, a truck. And so he sold me his he said, I’ll send you sell you my turntable. I bought that turntable off him. And then the Mac was cool, but I kind of was fascinated by tubes. I know that sounds weird, but you hear it a lot in guitars, you know, people get tube amplifiers.

Tubes were how, you know, amps were made back in the fifties and sixties, and then they went out for transistors. But now a lot of people like tubes again. They say, oh, it’s richer or whatever. That I found this cool company in Pennsylvania. And what’s what’s really interesting about this universe is that you know, all these audio people who are listening on their equipment that’s worth tens of thousands or hundreds of you know, they get it for very little money, I’d say, something like that.

That’s not me. So, like, I would get this amplifier to try out. And then if I liked it, I called the you know, I guess the benefit is I got to try it out, you know. But if I liked it, I called up the company. I was like, hey, I’d like to buy this.

So I bought it, you know. So that thing was not cheap, I gotta be honest. And then and then the funny thing is these beautiful harbor speakers, these amazing speakers, I realized they were still just not loud enough because I have bookshelf speakers. So I started looking all over the place and I was like, you know what? Maybe I need new speakers.

And I don’t didn’t understand this, but, you know, there are low powered speakers and high powered speakers. The d b’s are important, and I didn’t really get that at all, but now I do. So I found this company called Focal that puts out Focal Area nine zero six Ocean Speakers. And I bought those, and I sold my harpets on on the Internet for less than I bought them for whatever. And whatever.

And I finally had my system in place. And I gotta tell you, like, I’ve still gone over places to see people who have you know, giant speakers and massive systems. And it’s okay. Like, I could I I could live with that. Like, my system sounds really good.

Like, when I put a a record on, or if I put a digital file in through that deck, it sounds fantastic. I don’t need to do any better than this. And for me, the search at this point is really for music.

So

it’s like, if I find I found a really old copy of Odyssey and Oracle, the great Salbee’s record, when we were going to a wedding a couple weeks ago in Long Island, that’s where I feel good now. I’m not, like, going through stereo catalogs and going, like, oh, this this is a great receiver, but I I need better, you know? Or, like, how do I rebuild this room? Because it’s just not I’m very I mean, what I have is so great to me. Your

what you just described reminds me of a a very funny line from your your piece where I think one of your sources says, like, you can you can spend a million dollars and get around you can spend a million dollars on a Formula One car and get around the track in two minutes. Or you can spend ten million dollars on a car and get around the track in two minutes minus one second. Right? Like, you can like, if you once you get to a certain point, there the the cost starts getting exponentially higher for every marginal improvement, which is interesting, but it it it also kind of leads me to a question I have about who the new vinyl boom is really for. So, you know, I got a target and I walk to the checkout, and I see a rack of, like, an end cap, an end cap unit of, like, Taylor Swift Vinyl or a Dell Vinyl.

And I’m, like, oh, that’s interesting. I, like, this is obviously selling very well. If Target is placing it here, lots of people are buying this. But the people I assume who are buying these are not the folks who are spending ten thousand dollars on a set up at home. It’s kids.

I mean, kids are buying Adele albums and Taylor Swift albums. Right? Like,

who

is who is what what did what did the people you talk to believe that the the real audiences for this new wave of Vinyl enthusiasm that we’re seeing. Well, there

you know, I have Taylor Swift. I mean, like, I I mean, you know, the thing is I think that there are certain transcendent artists who are always going to be able to sell whatever they make. So there is a group of people that’ll just buy anything that a certain artist puts out because they want the product. You know what I mean? But I also think that, I mean, I just know from this story, I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who one have never had records before or haven’t never really thought about these things.

Even our design team, when we

played

the sound samples showing the difference in the record and the digital or the low res digital and the high res digital, they were like, oh my god. I can’t believe that, you know. And I I I got I got messages from like Chris Stein from Blonde sent me a screenshot of his successful guess at which Carol Kingfile was low res or high res,

you know, even people

have been at this forever are like taking pride and suddenly thinking about it differently. So I don’t know the answer to your question because I haven’t done a market research study, but I will tell you that

even in

my own little town where, you know, again, I’m feeling like an old man now, but people will come up to me because they now they know me is like knowing sound, which, you know, in this audiophile world, I’m like such a joke who knows nothing. But in this town, I’m a I’m a king damn it. I’m the record king, but they come up and they’re like, hey, we really wanna get into this. Like, it’d be fun to get some records. Like, what do we do?

And it’s a little daunting to to people coming in from the outside, but you know, for kids, it’s not. They just go to, like, urban outfit and get, like, a, like, one of those crappy suitcase things that look cool. Yeah. And they listen to their records until the record player breaks. The beauty of this though is, like, I’ve helped a couple of friends with this.

This this I didn’t even put them in the story, but I found them in in my search. And I I I love this company. And I bought, like, two different turntables for people from this company called u-turn. And they just they don’t sell them, like, Amazon or anything or or on in stereo catalogs, but they make this turntable. It’s like, I would say you’re reading the guy, Billy Fields, who is the head of Warner’s distribution or Vinyl program.

And I noticed this little turntable behind them. And I always say to people, I go, what do you got there? And then he’s like, oh, I got this u-turn turn table. It just sounds really good. It’s like really basic.

I, you know, I used to help them when they were starting out. So I call that company. They make a turntable. It’s two hundred and thirty nine dollars and then two hundred and sixty nine dollars if you have priamp put into it, which basically means you don’t need a receiver. You can go directly into speakers with that turntable.

It’s two hundred sixty nine dollars. It has its own cartridge, like a so it’s a it’s a real turntable, and it sounds really good. And it’s not like those ones that, as I said, were in the little suitcase that break down. So I bought one of these, brought them over my friend’s house, we set it up in their living room, and they love it. It’s just like they’re buying records, They never they’re they’re younger than I am, so they didn’t experience the actual original, like, oh, there are records, you know, used records to buy in the late seventies or early eighties.

Or all through the eighties. For them, this is a completely new thing, and it’s very enjoyable. And I don’t I don’t know why. I mean, you’d have to, like, connect electrodes to their brains and find out. But, I mean, I’m sure that it’s enjoyable because music is enjoyable and it’s universal.

And they’re finally able to kind of feel this connection with it in a way that it didn’t before. And that’s not because it sounds better. That’s because of the whole, like, the whole thing. You know? Maybe it sounds better.

Maybe they think it sounds better. They’re sitting down together. They’re putting something physically on something. They’re holding up that record, looking at, you know, it’s all part of the same thing. And, you know, what how you weigh each element of that.

I don’t know. But clearly, something’s happened here because people are buying records

beyond

what, you know, what we can press. Yeah.

Well, that the the physical infrastructure is is a totally fascinating question because I, you know, you you talk about this a little bit in your story, but, you know, we used to have tons of record stamping plants. You you there you know, because we were putting out forty five million copies of whatever, you know. I I forget what the actual number is, but the the we’re putting we used to be putting out tens of millions of LPs every year and obviously that stopped when we switched to CD and then, you know, m p three, whatever. And it’s trying to come back, but it’s limited. Right?

I mean, the the actual physical capacity of the ability to press records is simply not what we need right now. Well,

there was a I mean, the guy from, you know, Billy Fields, again, he said that we need to press about three fifty million records and we can press about a hundred and seventy million. And I noticed that because like I would talk to Quest Love about his amazing documentary on the Harlem Cultural Festival. What’s that called? That’s called summer of love. Summer of soul.

Summer of soul. Summer of soul. Summer of soul. So

and I would say to him

because I know this guy has, like, two hundred fifty thousand records in his house. I’d be, like, why are you putting out the soundtrack on CD and digital, but not on record right now? And he’d be like, I can’t get it pressed. Like, I you know, or I’d see Nirvana was doing an anniversary for Never Mind and was get it. It was coming out on CD and digital, and the records weren’t gonna come until, like, four months later.

I mean, Nirvana. It wasn’t, like, little folk singers who were, like, getting pushed out by, you know, j z or something, which is what you people would wanna present. It was everyone. There just isn’t enough. I mean, you I don’t know if you’ve seen these pictures, but I mean, I I always remember as a kid looking at these pictures of, like, auto plants in Detroit, like, the Packard plant.

And it was, like, this just you know, all these crumbling buildings with, like, empty parking lots and, like, you know, all those weeds coming through. And it was kinda like that. At a certain point in the music industry, they were like, hey, records are dead. And so they just destroyed all the record pressing plants or converted them into CD plants, which record pressing plants were nasty and they’re dirty places full of junk CD plants. It’s like a a operation, you know, room.

It has to be incredibly clean and and pristine. And so they just got rid of all these plants, and now they’re just trying to build them back. I mean, mobile fidelity is building one in California. Vitaly please, which does really great box sets. They’re building one in Colorado, and they’re just you know, we saw Jack White making a like build more pressing plants, you know.

They’re they’re trying to figure out a way to keep up with it because there’s no precedent for this. I mean, Aatrax didn’t go out and then come back, tapes didn’t go out and come back. CD’s haven’t. There’s there’s no real, you know, seventy eights. There’s no real precedent for a a a technology like this to return in this way.

I would I I would hit on

that a little

bit because

one of the things that is kind of an undercurrent in your story that that doesn’t quite come to the surface, but gets a couple mentions, is I I will use this word, the scourge of flippers. The the the people who buy the limited release copies and then sell them on eBay for you know, four hundred percent markup. I have some experience with this in various things that I buy and collect. Right? Like, this is this is kind of a thing that happens in every industry where collectibles become harder to harder to obtain.

How do how do the musicians you talk to feel about these guys? How do the record store owners you talk to feel about these guys? I mean, there’s there’s one record store owner you talk to living who lives in Cleveland, works out of Cleveland, and she’s like, look, I could put it on eBay and make a ton more money, but that’s violating the spirit of record store day. But it has to be frustrating to see these these limited releases immediately go for tons more money to what amount to middlemen speculators. Yeah.

And you I don’t

know what that leads to long term because, like, when I was a kid, I love baseball cards. Right? And like, baseball cards, you just went to the store and, like, bottom and packs or you went to the baseball card store and you could buy, like, a few very special ones like, oh, There’s Willie Mayes nineteen fifty six. That’s thirty five dollars. But at a certain point, like well, I’ll tell you when the point is nineteen eighty six.

Suddenly, all the old men were like, oh, baseball cards are worth so much, and they bought, like, endless boxes of baseball cards and didn’t open them. You know, left the gum in there, everything, and baseball cards suddenly were worth nothing. So, you know, I don’t know what that amounts to with records. It it it’s frustrating to me because, you know, if I wanna hear a record like, they put out Willie Nelson had that record Tietro, I think. It’s for, like, nineteen ninety seven that Daniel and I produced.

I love that record. I just love it. And when I look at it, online, it’s they put out a record store of day version of that, and it’s like four hundred dollars. Like, who would do that? And then I also don’t know, like, what’s the difference between what something is listed at and what its true value is?

You know, that’s that’s a pretty good question because you know, when they put out these records on the electric recording company, they sell out immediately, and then they’re up on eBay for a thousand dollars fifteen hundred dollars. Is someone buying those or they just listed as that? And they’re hoping that they get an offer. It’s it’s hard to tell. You know, I thought it was great that Britney the record store in Cleveland was so like loyal and and and felt that way.

But I don’t think that’s how I mean, when I talked to Chad Casham and Analog Productions, they reissue a lot of records. He was saying, you know, that he had no problem with the flippers, that it was just part of the business. I don’t know. There’s just something about it feels like music art. It’s like, you know, I feel the same way as when I read about you know, a really wealthy art collector gobbling up like everything at the art fair, putting it in a, you know, factory building, so that’ll it’ll just go up in value because then you just as often you hear the story that he decides, it’s worth nothing and he just liquidates all his stuff and ruins the value for the artists.

You know? I mean, the thing that’s really interesting about this to me is that also, I don’t think artists have any knowledge or any information on this. I don’t think they’re an all informed I don’t think that Carol King or Graham Nash or Elvis Castello or you know, doctor Dray, I don’t think they’re sitting around going like, well, I wonder what reissue is coming out and how much they’re charging for it and what the packaging is like. I just I don’t think they’re they’re that involved in that sort of thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the one of the another of the undercurrents in your story is the the idea of quality versus accessibility, quality versus ease of act. More or less. Right? And I one of the reasons I love this story, even though, again, I am not an audio file. I I for the record, for everybody listening out there, I tried to get into Vinyl relatively recently bought a turntable and and just like, it doesn’t it doesn’t do the same thing for me that it does for everybody else, but, god, love you.

But I am I am a movie guy and I am a collector of physical, you know, I prefer physical media, UK, Blu ray’s, whatever, UHD Blu ray’s getting the high quality stuff because it looks better. It looks better. It sounds better. And I I can I can see that and I can feel it and I can I can hold it, I can look at the packaging and and the labeling and all that. So I do get it.

But there there is this there there is this kind of tension in both industries, which is you know, you have the vast majority of people who just want access to stuff. They just want what’s streaming on Netflix or they just want what’s streaming on Spotify. And then you have a much smaller market that is like we wanna collect the best versions of these things. How does how does the music industry kind of balance that? How do they how do they make sure not to How do how do they figure out which of these audiences to service best?

Or is it even a is it doesn’t even really matter? I mean, is is is it so easy to do both that they can just be like, alright. We’re gonna do both. Well,

it seems to me like they can do both, and they figured out how to do both, but they haven’t really applied it yet. Like, I don’t I guess, what I don’t understand is And and I totally respect where you’re coming from music wise because what you’re describing with film is exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s I don’t have the feeling. I do like if I’m watching a film, I would rather have it on DVD than to be and and I hate when people send me, like, here’s an advanced link you could watch on your computer. It’s just something about it.

It just drives me bananas. But here’s the thing. If you’re a consumer of music, through digital means, which it sounds like you are. Why shouldn’t the digital music you’re listening to sound as good as it can sound? It doesn’t cost anyone anything more.

It doesn’t. It’s just a it you know, I mean, does it cost something to convert it? I I don’t I’m I’m not sure. You know, but it’s it’s for the

amount of

money that’s coming through this industry or this entertainment industry,

if there

is a cost at making it, you know, a higher resolution, it’s minimal. And so why shouldn’t you be given a better sounding version of that? Whether you’re asking for it or not. And then as far as this other level, like signing up for, you know, the advanced sale of this Youssef Latif box that that’s really up to you. You have to decide how much you care about this and what it means to you.

I mean, if you don’t get any joy out of your record player, why would you consume records? Right? It’s like it makes no sense at all. Anybody can tell you to and you’re not gonna wanna do it. And so, like, you know, I feel like the they figured it out.

I mean, Concord, which puts out the craft recordings. He’s, you know, the the use of Latif thing. I was just mentioning, I did Miles Davis. They put up small batch series. They come up three thousand to five thousand copies.

They’re about a hundred bucks each. That’s a major, you know, that’s not an indie label. That’s a major label putting up mainstream music. In a way they would deem special. I mean, analog productions, they do tons and tons of reissues of really they’re they’re putting out reissues of steely Dan on this new on this technology called UHQR.

That’s you know, the box sets are gonna be a hundred and fifty dollars. They say they’re gonna sound better than ever. They just put out a new Miles Davis kind of blue. So it’s like, that is all there and available. But for somebody who’s just listening, on their phone or, like, on their computer.

Like, why shouldn’t it be better? It doesn’t cost them anymore. Yeah.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Alright. That was everything I wanted to ask you. I always like to close these interviews by asking if there’s anything.

I should have asked if there’s anything you think folks should know about of, I don’t know, the the world of high quality music and and recordings. People should I I wanna I wanna emphasize that people should go read this story. There are cool little interactive things that you could do with it. I’ll have a link in the the email newsletter that goes out with this. But what should I what should I have asked you about the perfect sound?

Well, I just hope

people I’d like people to read that story with the understanding that, like, it’s not written for the people that I’m covering in that story. It’s written for you. I mean, it’s the reason that I pitch this and I spent so much time on it is because, you know, whether you’re walking down the street, listening on your iPhone, or again if you’re in your basement with like a chair marked off by painters tape because you have to be in specific location to hear things. Music’s universal. I mean, like, music is everything, and it’s important.

And so I just would hope people would just think a little bit more about why they listen to music and how they listen to music and figure out if they wanna, you know, change it in any way. You don’t have to. I mean, there’s really nothing wrong with listening any way you do, but you might find that, you know, you’re curious and you wanna get into it and it’s not that hard.

Again, everybody should go read the story. It’s really wonderful. And like I said, I am not a music guy. I am a I’m a video guy. I can I can talk all day about negatives and positives and transfers and all that stuff.

But I learned a ton. I learned a ton, and I think it’s really interesting And may maybe I’ll give that turntable another shot. Maybe I will sit down and, you know, start don’t tell my wife when I started buying, like, four thousand dollars speakers. She’ll know? I’ll

get I’ll get a box of I’ll get a box of records together for you and send them right off. Okay? Don’t worry.

Alright. Jeff, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m the culture editor at the Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another episode.

See

you guys then. Get an inside look at Hollywood with Michael Rosenbaum. Let’s get inside Deborah Ann Wall. If you had to choose between True Blood daredevil to do again. Partially because the

Marvel series feel unfinished to me because we got canceled when we thought we were gonna have more. Whereas true blood, we did get to wrap it up by knew that we were wrapping it up. I could say goodbye to everyone. I stole something from a set. I know I didn’t get to steal anything from our daredevil set.

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